The next several days passed with little change from this one, except that her eye and bruises faded and healed. She went about her daily business, seeing Bretagne only in passing as he came and went with his men. Ursula, however, was a constant presence; when she wasn’t lounging at one of the fires in the hall, she was in the second seat at the otherwise empty High Table. Gwynn could only imagine that she thought she was establishing—or re-establishing—her position as the most important woman of the household, but the only thing she accomplished was to look like a bone-lazy layabout. Perhaps the men-at-arms weren’t affected, but every working woman, and a good many of the male servants, began casting looks of resentment at her before too very long.
Ursula was in the process of making herself cordially hated by every underling in the keep, which had the effect of edging more support over to Gwynn’s side. She was not closing herself up in her solar, playing the fine lady, although she and everyone else in the keep knew that she was perfectly within her rights as Bretagne’s wife to do so. No, she was down in the stillroom making medicines, remedies, soaps, rushlights, tallow-dip candles—the many items long needed in the running of the keep, which no one had been making for many years now since Bretagne’s mother had died. Or she was in the kitchen, not only supervising but teaching, even preparing food herself, helping the cooks become proper cooks again. Or she was helping to clean, as well as directing the cleaning, or in the tiny dairy—for there was one, after all, though all the milk had to be brought up from the keep farms down below—or…
Well, there were hundreds of tasks to be done, and unless she was recovering from a beating, she was down there doing them. Nor was there any doubt, when she finally appeared after the beatings, of why she had merely issued orders rather than appearing herself for a day or two and that she had not been lazing about.
She had been accustomed to being the lady of a much smaller household than this, where every person needed to turn a hand to the work; she saw nothing demeaning in continuing that practice here. And though this might be a much larger household than her father’s, it had been so long since it was properly run that only the oldest servants truly knew what must be done and how to do it. There would be no sitting for hours at an embroidery frame in the solar for her for a very long time to come.
Not surprisingly, she was dreading the day when she would have to once again present herself to her husband for his—ungentle attentions. If only he could have been summoned to the King for some campaign or other! Her life had been so very peaceful, even pleasant, during the week when her courses kept her from his bed—
She greeted the first morning when they were over with a sigh and a distinct lowering of her spirits. Robin noted, of course, but a few of the more perceptive of the servants noticed, as well, and probably guessed the cause. There was one relief, at least; good, clear weather sent Bretagne out with a hunting party at dawn, so at least the keep would be utterly free of his presence until near sunset.
A great keep such as this one could not store enough to feed all of the people within it, and hunting was necessary to keep everyone fed over the course of the winter. The huntsmen would go out every day for the hares that had been snared, and other small game, but only the nobility could slay the deer and boar—the deer by King’s law, and the boar because it took a well-armed hunting party to bring one down. With good fortune, Bretagne and his young knights would return with fresh venison or wild boar to augment the larder.
With better fortune, he would return gored to death or with his neck broken—
She winced and set those thoughts aside, attractive as they were. She knew better than to make such a thought into a wish, for there was always the chance it might come to pass, especially for one such as she. If such retribution came upon him, she did not yet have the right to be the engineer of it.
Now, if he came back black-and-blue and aching in every limb, after having been carried by a runaway horse through a thicket of low-hanging branches, then dumped into a thorn bush or a rocky streambed, that would be just retribution….
The thought made her smile and brightened her day, just a little, as she bent her attention on the rescue of a kettle of stew that had suffered at the hand of an undercook with no understanding that a “pinch” of salt did not mean a handful.
Then she retired to the stillroom, where she could work quietly and peacefully, with nothing more to worry about than ointment for chilblains, from which nearly everyone in the keep was suffering. Robin assisted her, which was a great help, for it often took four hands when things were at a critical point in the compounding.
She had just finished putting the last of the cooling ointment into a jar when—
“Milady! Milady!”
The frantic—nay, hysterical—call from the back of the keep startled her, but no more so than the knowledge of danger and urgency that sent her running in the direction of the voice, Robin following, hot on her heels. She literally ran into the maidservant who had been calling her, and the young woman clung to her, sobbing in panic and fear.
This was the way of things in a well-run keep; trust as deep as instinct sent underlings running to the lady, sure that no matter what the crisis, she and she alone could solve it. At that moment, Gwynn knew she had come into her own sort of power here.
“The baby…the baby—” it was all the maid could get out around her tears, but she seized Gwynn’s hand and dragged her in the direction of the servants’ quarters with surprising strength.
“What about the baby? Which baby?” Gwynn gasped as the maid hauled her through a part of the keep that she had not yet been to, one that housed most of the lower servants. There were babies enough here, she supposed, but she didn’t see most of them; they were kept well out of the way of the adults, or at least, the adults of any rank. Some of them supposedly were Bretagne’s get—another and more compelling reason to keep them out of Lady Gwynnhwyfar’s way, she supposed….
“My baby—oh, milady—” she wailed, and that was all that Gwynn got from her before they reached the site of the trouble, at the back of the keep, in a windowless little room—and then, all she had to do was to point—
Point to a hole in the floor of a tiny little alcove of a room, from which a thin, weak wail arose.
“The well—” the maid sobbed. “He fell down the well!”
It was easy to see how—there was a wooden cover that was supposed to shut the well up, but either someone had carelessly left it to one side or the child himself had been just old enough and strong enough to drag it off. In either case, it would take very little to send a young and curious child tumbling down into the depths. Gwynn seized a torch from the wall and dropped to her knees, her heart in her mouth, to peer down the rock-carved shaft—
A contorted face looked up at hers, red, tear-streaked, and another wail echoed up to her. Too young—oh, blessed Jesu, far too young to grab and hold to a rope dropped to it, and heartbreakingly out of reach.
The walls of the well shaft must have been hard to cut, for they narrowed abruptly right at the point where the baby had lodged. Unfortunately that was a good four yards down, and even though the baby had both fat little hands stretched up to her, there was no way in which to get hold of its wrists to haul it out.
And there was always the danger, increasing with every moment, that whatever had caught the baby would give way at any moment, dropping it into the water below, where it would surely drown.
But Gwynn was her mother’s daughter—
Gwynn spun and faced the maid. “Run!” she snapped, breaking through the maid’s hysterical tears. “Find the cook and Sir Atremus. Get more help. Now!”
Without a word, the maid turned and ran.
“What on earth—” Robin stammered as Gwynn fumbled at the laces of her gown.
“Help me get this off—I can’t go down there wearing this—I’ll get down as far as I can, then you’ll have to hold my ankles and lower me as far as you can—”
“And then what?” Robin demanded, even as she obeyed, stripping the heavy woolen gown from her mistress and leaving her standing there in her linen undergown, her skin already prickling with gooseflesh. “You can’t reach the baby even with me holding you!” Then, “Oh,” she said numbly as she realized what Gwynn meant to do.
“Yes. And I daren’t have any witness,” she said flatly, then pulled the undergown over her head and dropped it on the floor. “Now, hold my ankles and lower me over.”
Robin made no further objections. Gwynn edged over the side of the well, crawled down the shaft, then felt Robin’s powerful hands grasping her ankles. She waited until Robin was well-braced and slipped down into the dark shaft without any support but Robin’s hands. Dark, damp, cold and with the child’s frantic wails coming up to her, it was like falling into a pit of the damned for just a moment.
But of course, with a whisper, she called up a witch light, a dim, blue orb that was enough to show her the claustrophobic confines of the shaft and the baby below her, but not enough to dazzle her vision.
This would drain her past anything she had ever done before; it didn’t matter, not when there was a child’s life at stake.
She concentrated on the baby and began to whisper, to chant under her breath; the chant of the magic mill—the rhythm of magic itself, in time with the heartbeat pounding in her ears.
“Air breathe and air blow, make the mill of magic go, work my will and spin my charms, bring the babe safe to my arms—”
She felt the air begin to move around her, spinning up the power of air to answer her need. A good sign; the magic moved freely here, open to her will.
“Fire seethe and fire burn, make the mill of magic turn, work my will and spin my charms, bring the babe safe to my arms—”
Above her, in the keep, all the flames in all the fires would be spinning now, whirling up the chimneys, adding their power to that of air.
“Water freeze and water boil, make the mill of magic toil, work my will and spin my charms, bring the babe safe to my arms—”
There was water enough here and more, in the breath of the well alone, to add that element to the threefold power that she had woven; she sensed it moving below as the well water began a slow spin deosil to match the air in the well shaft.
“Earth without and earth within, make the mill of magic spin, work my will and spin my charms, bring the babe safe to my arms!”
She felt it—felt strength and energy draining out of her—she heard it, heard the little grate, the scraping below her. And she saw it, saw the child shake a little, then saw him start to rise, slowly spinning with the air, magic spinning around it, scraping along the wall, his little skirts tearing loose from the rocks that the fabric had caught on—
She continued to whisper the charm, willing the baby closer, closer—until…
With a yell of triumph that started the child into fresh wails, she caught its wrists with her outstretched hands. The magic snapped then, but no matter; she could hold him and the weight pulling her arms was welcome, welcome—
And just in time; she heard the noise of a crowd, shouting and running footsteps rushing up above where Robin still held her. She extinguished the witch light, lest they catch sight of it, and now with the light gone, the baby howled in fear.
“Pull me up! Pull me up!” she shouted to Robin.
But at that moment she felt more hands than Robin’s grabbing her; on her ankles and calves, then hauling at the hem of her shift, pulling her and the baby out of the well shaft together in a tumbling of hands and bodies.
Her body, and that of Robin’s—and Sir Atremus. His had been the extra hands on her legs that she had felt pulling her up so quickly!
But she still had the baby as she rolled over. She pulled it to her chest, only half hearing the stammering apologies for the “insult” the men around her had done in placing their hands on a lady, and let them get her to her feet again, still clutching the wailing child, looking for its mother in the crowd.
There! She shoved the baby at the maid who had called her, but it was one of the men-at-arms who snatched the howling child up, as Robin swiftly, and with some indignation, bundled her back into her gown. Of course, the servants had seen far too much already, for there wasn’t a great deal of concealment available to one who was dangling head-down in a well, dressed only in a shift….
Her head was swimming, but she fought back the need to collapse onto Robin. The man who had taken the child, though—when Gwynn’s head emerged from the folds of the gown, she saw with some surprise that it was—
The captain of the set of guards that had come to bring her to Clawcrag in the first place, who she now knew was named Wulfred. He was—great heavens!—he was cuddling and comforting the boy like a nursemaid, his own face tear-streaked, one large, scar-seamed hand on the child’s back, the other arm supporting him as if this was something he was entirely used to doing, while the maidservant clung to both of them and wept in relief.
“Wulfred?” she said incredulously. “Is this your lad?”
He looked up at her with eyes, not cold and calculating, but full of—blessed Mary!—something very like worship. “Aye, my lady. God bless you, my lady. God bless—”
But that was the moment when it all caught up with her, for every bit of power she had needed to haul that child into her own arms had come from her, of course. The four elements—the air and the water, primarily—had only been the extension of her will, something like her arms; the strength had come from her. Only magic that had been planned in advance, calculated, scribed into words of power and shaped into glyphs and figures, using wands and talismans, crystals and potions, came “without effort.” “Without effort”—hardly that, but the effort was spaced out over days, weeks, months, even years. Hasty magic, the kind she had just performed, came from the heart and the soul—
—and, unfortunately, the body.
So just as Wulfred set his baby into the mother’s arms and went down on one knee to her, she felt her eyes roll up into her head, her knees buckle, and she fainted dead away.